Let me try to answer his question to the Identity Gang here:
Has Identity 2.0 got anything to say about this? Is the[re] some strategy where we can put a positive marker in our scribblings [all over the web] so that automated processes can find them all and bring them all back together?
Identity 2.0 is Dick Hardt‘s term, so I’m looking forward what his answer is to this question. But from a LID perspective, I completely agree with Julian’s question, and we have lots of things to say about that, such as:
- The LID POST Sender Profile, and LID POST Receiver Profile (in beta at mylid.net) are specifically targeted towards this use case. Follow the links to find out more, but in short:
- Using those LID profiles, a LID-authenticated sender can send an “HTTP Post” to a receiver with an arbitrary payload. This HTTP Post is a slightly extended version of the HTTP Post virtually any website uses to let people post, but it is authenticated and involves both sender and receiver:
- Both by the sender and the receiver get copies of the post. The policy of what they do with it is up to them (e.g. put on a web page, forward to e-mail etc.)
- The Post is contextual — not just “send message to person/site XYZ”, but “send message in the context of this particular URL”, e.g. a blog post that somebody is commenting on.
- The entire HTTP Post is digitally signed, so nobody can tamper with it or repudiate it afterwards. It also has a time stamp.
So in the LID world, we already address this problem, without requiring anybody to rely on a search engine, for example,to figure out what they posted. That’s because the sender has a full log of everything they ever posted using LID. (Which requires broad adoption of this protocol going forward, but the technology is there already.)
You can try it out by going to my mylid.net/jernst LID URL, and send me a message, for example. (“Hi” is fine, spam is not!) If you go there and can’t see how to do it: you first need to identify yourself against my LID URL using your own LID URL because as a matter of policy, I don’t accept anonymous messages there. (If you don’t have one, you can get a LID from signup.mylid.net for example.)
Updated with link to Julian’s question now also on his blog.